superhero update
I typically don't like superheroes at all, so having a post that talks about nothing else is a little different.



I saw both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight for the first time a few weeks ago. I had rather low hopes for both, I must admit. Batman Begins starts out pretty well, though--the first act with Wayne in a foreign prison and going through the motions of figuring out his calling in life is kind of cool. I liked the Liam Neeson character and a lot of the backstory. The problem was that nothing that came after that interested me at all. Batman is one of my least favorite superheroes, so this isn't too surprising. I think he relies too much on gadgets and garbage and not enough on savvy and fighting. Don't get me started on stupidity like the Batmobile, the very name of which forever dooms it to being completely stupid. And that's my biggest issue with Batman, I think: he's got bat-this and bat-that and his weapons are shaped like bats and his vehicles are supposed to look cool and dark and bad ass, but they come off as clumsy and unwieldy and way too over the top. He starts out in prison and as a thief dressed in rags and he ends up using Batarangs and (god help us all) calling for help from a group of bats using ultrasound emitters. To make things worse, the villain was pretty lame and the plot to make everyone in Gotham go crazy using fear gas was utterly ridiculous and boring. To recap: I had low hopes going in, the first act made me think that this movie actually might be good, then the rest of the movie convinced me it really was crap and there was no hope for Batman anything. Batman is doomed to be lame, I think, just because of how ridiculous the entire character is. I hate the stupid gadgetry and that's what everyone else likes about the character. Oh, well.

Then I saw The Dark Knight and it was loads better, but still not that great of a movie. The whole deal with Batman going to Hong Kong to retrieve the Chinese businessman was unnecessary and should have been cut. I liked Heath Ledger as the Joker and think he did a good job, but I don't get the calls for Oscars and people saying what a great performance it was. He made a great character, that's true, but he didn't really have enough to do to make it some acting tour de force. The story called for him to show up and go nuts, then disappear until he had to come be nuts again. He was fantastic at being nuts, though.

I really did like the shot of the Joker driving the police car with his head sticking out of the window. For some reason, it was just a really pretty shot.

The storyline was pretty absurd, however, as apparently the Joker became a magical character with godlike abilities to be in eight places at once and pull off complex schemes that he concocted in two days. Oh, you think you caught me, Batman?!?! Well what you don't know is that I've secretly placed a giant death beam in space that is pointing at your face right now. Lulz!

That is not interesting in a movie. There was a decent job of piling on the tense and complicated situations toward the end, though, to show how Batman cut through everything and saved the day. Overall, not bad but not that great.



I watched the first few episodes of Heroes the other day to see if it was any good, but I thought it was mostly five characters in search of a plot. I'm going to give it a few more episodes to see if it gets better, but I'm curious if anyone watches it regularly and can tell me if it does. I thought the writing was surprisingly not good and figured ordinary people with superhuman abilities would be a shoe in for an addicting show, but so far I'm not feeling it.